Growing Up So Fast

Since she was a wee tiny thing, I've always known that Claire is the studious sort. She was eager to learn to sit up at about six months of age but after that she was perfectly content to sit and study the world. The mere idea of locomotion didn't occur to her till she was almost 10 months old and realized she could size things up better if she were closer to them. Honestly...she taught herself to crawl in the space of one hour all because the vacuum cleaner was too far away for her to fondle. I have a video of that somewhere. Lemme see...



Awww...

As she's gotten older, she hasn't been a running, jumping child like a lot of her little buddies. We enrolled her in gymnastics last year because her gross motor skills were so abysmal that we thought she needed some sort of intervention (it worked like a charm). Instead, Claire was the child who wanted to learn how to draw pictures or print her letters or learn definitions of "big words". For a long time, her favourite movie was "Leap Frog: Letter Factory" (more exciting than Dora even).

Last year, she went to Montessori school. She liked it a lot at first and learned a million things about a million things. One day she came home and rhymed off six facts about fish (they have scales, they lay eggs, they are cold blooded, they breathe with gills, etc). Another time she told me the names of all the continents. On a third occasion, I picked her up and the teacher told me she could read a list of small words.

Then all of a sudden, all the learning stopped. She wasn't being pressured at home or at school so I don't think that was the issue. However, her disillusion with school coincided pretty closely with the onset of her bladder/kidney infections and I think the kid just felt like yuck for the better part of six months last year (if not longer).

In September we enrolled her in a different program and she started in on antibiotics for her double ureter and suddenly Learns-A-Lot-Claire was back. She started asking about how to read all the time and was suddenly interested in basic addition and subtraction. She'd take Jillian aside and try to educate her about all the things she had just learned at school. I thought it was all pretty cool.

Still, I was awfully surprised when the kid actually started reading and writing full sentences. Her teacher told me that she had to sound words out for herself and that I was to resist the urge to correct her or try to teach her too many spelling rules (so. very. difficult.) but it seems to work so I follow my instructions. One day she came home with a page she had done where she was to draw her favourite toy and write what it did. Her page had a drawing of her favourite ball and a caption that said "mi. bol. rols." (they learned about punctuation marks the same week).

For Christmas, I bought her a bunch of beginner readers, thinking that in a few months she'd be able to read them on her own. Nope. We read 'em once, help her with words she doesn't know and she's off and running. Today I captured this super sweet moment - reading an entire book to her sister:



Yesterday she was dragging herself across the carpet to get to the vacuum. Today, she can read books. Too fast...wayyyyy too fast.

I spend a fair amount of time wondering how a little brother is gonna mess with serene, studious Claire's life...hoo boy...we're in trouble.